This blog is about The Big Picture - information and insights about what goes on in the world outside our borders - and what it means for Americans. Unless otherwise specified, all photos from Deena Stryker archive.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Finishing the Job

The existence of an American-backed putsch government in Ukraine suggests that Washington has decided to finish the job it started almost a century ago. The remotely controlled events in Ukraine are not about bringing liberal democracy to that country, but about securing its rich black soil for agribusiness, its minerals for defense contractors, its cheap labor for Washington's European 'allies', and most of all, about drawing Russia into an armed conflict that would finish what was started in 1919, when a motley Western coalition known as the White Army tried to arrest the momentum of the Russian Revolution. Since then, pernicious socialist ideas have spread beyond the industrial world to the four corners of its former colonies, seriously inconveniencing the 1%'s plan to dominate the planet.

World War II interrupted the task of defeating people's power. (Soviets were workers' councils, and today's referendum in Donetsk and Lugansk calls for a People's Republic.) The war against Germany and Japan was a school yard fight among capitalists for supremacy, forcing the liberal democracies to engage Germany and Japan, momentarily interrupting their main task, which was to defeat Stalin's Soviet Union. As soon as that war ended, Washington picked up the fight against communism,with the Berlin Air Lift, the Korean War, containment and the Cold War.

Fast forward, the 'communist threat' having been officially extinguished with the demise of the Soviet Union, in 2001 Americans were instructed to focus on Islamic terrorism so that the war complex could finish off the so-called 'peace dividend', obfuscating the fact that Russia would be an enemy in the halls of power as long as the socialist ethos remained popular across the globe: was not the second largest economy in the world, the European Union, a social democracy? Were not most third world countries trying to combine capitalist development with socialist protections? The economic crisis of 2008 seriously wounded the European welfare state, but did nothing to dissuade the rest of the world from setting up free clinics and Bolsas Familiales (as in Brazil), putting a crimp in the goal of world domination by the 1% centered around Wall Street and the defense industry.

Although upon the demise of the Soviet Union Gorbatchev had been given to understand that NATO would not advance into the former satellite countries of Eastern Europe, NATO got around that by coupling its membership with that of the European Union, to which most of the former satellite countries aspired. Currently, as Russia is forced to defend its influence in Ukraine (the two countries being not only neighbors, but essentially part of the same geo-political entity going back a thousand years), NATO rushes to conduct war games in the Baltic counties while readying missiles for Poland, ostensibly to defend against Russia's supposed goal of recreating the Soviet Union.

My review of 'The Russian Tradition' by Tibor Szamuely (http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Russian-Tradition-by-by-Deena-Stryker-Class_Community_Conspiracy_Democracy-140509-717.html details Russia's evolution following two hundred and fifty years of Mongol domination, how it came to be the largest country on earth and why long frontiers imply constant threats. It also suggests that absent any direct threat, Russia has no reason to again take over the Baltic republics, much less Poland. Last but not least, it suggests why Putin's plans for a Eurasian entity include support for modernization in the Muslim countries on its southern rim, which is the opposite of America's bellicose approach to the Islamist threat.

Alas, relying on sound bites to follow current events, the American public fails to differentiate between self-defense forces and shock troops determined to take power in Ukraine, allowing Washington to praise Neo-Nazi fighters that deposed an elected President in Kiev, while describing ordinary people erecting barricades against them in Odessa as terrorists. This abysmal lack of knowledge results in the most powerful country the world has even seen being able to accuse others for its bellicosity. Forcing Russia into a defensive position by accusing it of designs on its neighbors, then offering NATO protection, is part of Washington's fight against the only two countries which together could challenge its dominance: Russia and China.

While war against Germany and Japan was a regrettable necessity among capitalist countries vying for world power, war against China and Russia is a battle between a dominant power that consider the 99% redundant as it rapes the planet, and two older civilizations that have replaced communism with capitalism in order to better secure the well-being of their populations. Russia, with the greatest land mass, and China with the largest population, head a coalition that includes India, Brazil and South Africa, and because it is to them that a world determined to shake off American hegemony is looking, that battle combines an Asian pivot intended to contain China, with efforts to finish off Russia once and for all.

Eastern and southern Ukrainians do not have to think twice about who to support as their country is literally forced into civil war by outside forces, because their worldview was formed by their grandparents' recitations of atrocities endured at the hands of Hitler and his Ukrainian allies, the Banderists worshiped by the Right Sektor now in power. They are as incapable of accepting fascism now as their grandparents were in The Great Patriotic War. But because the arrow of time is irreversible (http://www.opednews.com/articles/Copycat-Demonstrations-and-by-Deena-Stryker-Austerity_Austerity_Compromise_History-140413-471.html) and the same playbook used on Russia's ally, Syria is being repeated in Ukraine, that country too is likely to descend into civil war without there being anything anyone can do about it.

There crucial question is: Will popular resistance to a fascist takeover of Ukraine inspire activists around the world? Will the 1% succeed in its effort to plunder the planet while marginalizing 99% of its inhabitants, or will the spring and color revolutions that morphed into occupies lead to a unified 99% across frontiers and religions to defeat globalization, which is fascism's latest avatar?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Welcome to Otherjones!

As announced a month ago, henceforth I will post all my blogs here, abandoning websites that support their editors, but not their writers. I'm looking for thirty readers willing to contribute $10 a month each. They will receive an article every day in their inbox.

The alternative press is replete with despair and ‘hope’, neither of which is helpful. ‘Squawking’, as Chris Hedges puts it, may alleviate some of the pain Americans experience at being identified with a government that brutalizes Others at will, but it doesn’t change the ‘facts on the ground’. As for hope, it is an easy cop-out: in the present state of the world, we can never be certain that tomorrow will come. Whether a barefoot child in Africa or a hedge-fund manager, all of us are the potential victims of hubris.

My goal is to prepare my readers in ways more important than stockpiling food and bandages for whatever happens, as we transition from an American century to a world century, helping them see through the web of lies with which we are being controlled.
Having lived for years at a time in half a dozen ‘foreign’, countries — learning their languages and histories — I have a unique ability to identify events that bear watching. That life, however, could not provide ‘retirement benefits’, so if you appreciate the unique combination of information and insight that characterizes my work, I hope you will integrate a small donation to Otherjones into your budget.

By clicking on the Donate button, you will be able to contribute via Paypal or your credti card. Thanks!
P.S. I encourage you to review the archive, by clicking first on the year triangle, then on that of each month. You will find many posts from recent years still relevant today.

Subscribe to our mailing list

If You Had Been Watching....

One of the worst aspects of the US media landscape is its neglect of what goes on in the rest of the world. When I returned from nineteen years of living in France, where I sometimes watched CNN’s excellent coverage of world events, I was surprised that in the US, CNN did nothing comparable. I called the main editorial office in New York and was told ’Americans aren’t interested in foreign affairs’, revealing one one the reasons
why the US government gets away with wreaking havoc around the world: Americans have no information that would prompt them to protest their county’s actions abroad.

The fact is that several countries’ governments — aside from the British — fund international television channels. These include France 24, NHK (Japan) , Al-Jazeera (Qatar) RT (Russia) and Telesur (Latin America). These channels usually broadcast in English, Spanish and Arabic, using native speakers, enabling most people in most parts of the world to hear news that their national outlets do not cover, getting a unique window onto the world.

Meanwhile, Americans are told that the channel that is most significant for them, RT, is propaganda!

RT is significant not only because, like the other foreign channels it offers a wide range of programs but because it includes opinions from many well-known Americans who never appear on our own msm.

I intend to try, insofar as my time permits, to signal news stories covered by these foreign channels that are absent from our own, many of which are significant.